Poetry for Memorization
Fall 1998
1. Limerick
There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe,
He woke in a fright
In the middle of the night
And found it was perfectly true.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
2. Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay (US 1892-1950)
6. O do not Love Too Long
W. B. Yeats (Irish 1865-1939)
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
3. Tell All the Truth
Emily Dickinson (US 1830-1886)
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
4. An Immortality
Ezra Pound (US 1885-1972)
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men’s believing.
5. Bereft
All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other’s,
We were so much at one.
But O, in a minute she changed–
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.
7. Magna est Veritas
Coventry Patmore (English
1823-1896)
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevails or not.
8. The Idle Life I Lead
Robert Bridges (1844-1930)
The idle life I lead
Is like a pleasant sleep,
Wherein I rest and heed
The dreams that by me sweep.
Robert Frost (US 1874-1963)
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
And still of all my dreams
In turn so swiftly past,
Each in its fancy seems
A nobler than the last.
And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss,
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.
9. The Mask W. B. Yeats (Irish 1865-1939)
‘Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.’
‘O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.’
‘I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.’
‘It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.’
‘But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.’
‘O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?’
10. love is more thicker than forget
e. e. cummings (US 1894-1962)
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
11. Success is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson (US 1830-1886)
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag today
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory.
As he defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
12. Let No Charitable Hope
Elinor Wylie (US 1886-1929)
Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
13. Silence
1886-1978)
John Hall Wheelock (US
There is a mystery too deep for words;
The silence of the dead comes nearer to it,
Being wisest in the end. What word shall hold
The sorrow sitting at the heart of things,
The majesty and patience of the truth!
Silence will serve; it is an older tongue:
The empty room, the moonlight on the wall,
Speak for the unreturning traveller.
14. The Watch
Francis Cornford (English 1886-1960)
I wakened on my hot, hard bed,
Upon the pillow lay my head;
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continual discontent,
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick;
O death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.
15. Let Me Enjoy
Thomas Hardy (English 1840-1928)
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
And in the edges of the snow.
About my path there flies a Fair,
Who throws me not a word or sign;
I’ll charm me with her ignoring air,
And laud the lips not meant for mine.
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,–
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood’s obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accoutrements of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
From manuscripts of moving song
Inspired by scenes and dreams unknown,
I’ll pour out raptures that belong
To others, as they were my own.
And some day hence, towards Paradise
And all its blest–if such should be–
I will lift glad, afar-off eyes,
Though it contain no place for me.
16. Tattoo
Wallace Stevens (US 1879-1955)
17. Epidermal Macabre
Theodore Roethke (US 1908-1963)
18. Two limericks
The light is like a spider
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there –
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
An epicure, dining at Crewe,
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout,
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one, too!”
There was a young man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan;
When they said it was so,
He replied, “Yes, I know,
But I always try to get as many words into
the last line as ever I possibly can.”